Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had no idea instant karma was going to knock Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella right in the head.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.

Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer did a lot of things that were pretty embarrassing when he was the CEO of Microsoft (MSFT). But none of them hold a candle to the ridiculous comments by his successor, Satya Nadella.

Nadella told attendees at a tech conference for women this week that female employees shouldn't ask for raises because it would be "good karma" to not do so. He also suggested that women should have faith that "the system" will compensate them over the long haul and that staying silent was even one of the "superpowers" for women.

You can watch the remarks in the video below, along with analysis from CNN's Maggie Lake and Laurie Segall.

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Nadella later apologized on Twitter.

Was inarticulate re how women should ask for raise. Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias #GHC14

Can Nadella recover from this? Probably. But it's a huge stain on his reputation, which up until now was unblemished.

Wall Street loves the fact that Nadella was the anti-Ballmer. He's more reserved and calm. He clearly gets where tech is going, and investors are excited by his emphasis on mobile and cloud computing. Microsoft's stock is up more than 25% since Nadella was named CEO in February.

Shares did fall Friday though, prompting me to tweet this unsolicited advice for Nadella before the market opened.

$MSFT down pre-market. Satya Nadella shouldn't worry though. If he has faith in Wall Street, the stock will go back up. It's good karma. Oy.

I'm not sure why Ballmer and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever decided to recreate "Night at the Roxbury" -- one of the least funny skits in "Saturday Night Live" history.

And there's this awesome promotional video for the first Windows way back in 1985.

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The list goes on and on.

Ballmer laughed when asked about how well the iPhone would do after Apple (AAPL) first introduced it. Oops.

He dismissed the iPad as "just another PC" and joked that the Mac was more like a Mack truck while PCs were more elegant cars. Where's Britney Spears? Oops he did it again.

He cackled when someone asked him at a 2009 Microsoft developers (developers developers developers) conference about Google's (GOOGL) Chrome. "Who knows what this thing is?" Triple scoop of oops with a huge topping of wrong sauce.

But about the most controversial/offensive thing Ballmer ever did (besides not make Microsoft shareholders that much richer) was calling open source software Linux a cancer.

That was a stupid remark. But at least Ballmer didn't insult half of the U.S. population like Nadella did.

Who says PCs are dinosaurs? Intel and Microsoft are the top stocks in the Dow this year.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.

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